Nocturne in Moonlight
Because the window crept across an aching moon,
I woke beside my naked form, undulating with breath,
warm as rising dough, fragrant as new made loaves.
This once familiar body, browned in summer’s furnace;
this shelter with its wild garden; this house without curtains
on some busy street; this fleshly web of dew-strung distances,
crossed and double-crossed from the unmade bed, through
amplitudes of silence.
Someone’s heavy hands lean upon the silver
ledge of night, above its hedge of tremulous leaves, all longing
for the body of a woman.
How dreadful these days
of the week, hardened sounds of measured time:
Roman, Saxon, Teutonic, dark powers of the past,
quivering confluence of blood and the written word.
How unlike Orion, canyons of clay, temples of storm,
pendulous fruit-bearing organs or perfumed deeds
of alabaster men sowing seeds in furrows.
The calendar,
uncertain and still,
as if blackened dates
upon the wall could be pressed like wild flowers.
There are
silhouettes of trees seizing souls of me; there are midnight forms
like tattered veils blowing; there is a river which fills with blood
and a foaming ocean longing for more.
Penultimate moon
of the full, your task too is incomplete, your unbidden presence,
the only answer, reserved for yet another night,
when the furious day
yields once more
but ashes.
(Newport, USA)
Page(s) 6
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